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A few months ago, I became the proud, and slightly sheepish, owner of what must be the world's most expensive food processor. The Thermomix costs about $1,500. It not only chops the food but weighs the ingredients and cooks them for you while stirring constantly. Perfect hollandaise and flawless béchamel can be produced in minutes with virtually no effort.

After seeing one last summer in the home of a friend, I promised myself one if I completed a particularly large and time-consuming research project. By the time I did, I was no longer sure that I wanted to spend the price of a good chair or a bad car on a kitchen-counter appliance. But I went ahead and ordered one. However guilty the pleasure, I couldn't resist the joy of the long-planned splurge.

Nor, it seems, can any of my countrymen. For decades, Americans have wallowed in credit, shunned savings and delighted in debt. In 1982, the personal savings rate was 10.9% of disposable income, by 2005 it had fallen to just 1.5%. It has since rebounded, but remains a measly 5%.

Shiny Objects
By James A. RobertsSpend
HarperOne, 353 pages, $25.99

All this profligacy supports a rather vibrant cottage industry in polemics against consumerism. Authors as varied as the economist Robert H. Frank (1999's "Luxury Fever") and the political theorist Benjamin R. Barber (2007's "Consumed") have ganged up on what they see as the particularly unequal and excessive American spending habits. Unsurprisingly considering their abhorrence of waste, they are avid recyclers; the same arguments, behavioral economics studies and anecdotes appear time and time again. Access to credit makes consumers overspend. Materialistic people are anxious and unhappy. The conspicuous-consumption arms race is unwinnable. Down with status competition! Down with long work weeks, grueling commutes and McMansions! Up with family time, reading and walkable neighborhoods! The effect is rather like strolling down the main tourist strip in a beach town: Each merchant rushes out of his shop, gesticulating wildly and showing you exactly the same thing that you saw at all the previous stores.

The latest person to open up shop on this boardwalk is Baylor marketing professor James A. Roberts. "Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don't Have in Search of Happiness We Can't Buy" runs mostly true to form, its main innovation being to add financial self-help advice to the usual lectures. The book includes not only exhortations but actual instructions—how to make a budget, get out of debt and save for retirement.

Against Thrift
By James Livingston
Basic Books, 257 pages, $27.50

It's a thorough survey of both academic research on consumerism and basic finance advice. Still, I first ran into an argument I hadn't seen before somewhere around page 200—that the perfect surfaces of modern products hasten the replacement cycle because they show wear so badly—and well before then Mr. Roberts had fallen into some of the terrible habits of the genre. Though less openly contemptuous of the spendthrift masses than many of his fellow scolds, he still exudes that particular sanctimonious anti-materialism so often found among modestly remunerated professors and journalists.

Here are some of the things that upset him and that "document our preoccupation with status consumption": Lucky Jeans, bling, Hummers, iPhones, 52-inch plasma televisions, purebred lapdogs, McMansions, expensive rims for your tires, couture, Gulfstream jets and Abercrombie & Fitch. This is a fairly accurate list of the aspirational consumption patterns of a class of folks that my Upper West Side neighbors used to refer to as "these people," usually while discussing their voting habits or taste in talk radio. As with most such books, considerably less space is devoted to the extravagant excesses of European travel, arts-enrichment programs or collecting first editions.

One of the running themes of the economist Robin Hanson's excellent blog is that arguments like the ones found in these books are actually an elite-status proxy war. They denigrate the one measure of high-visibility achievement—income—that public intellectuals don't do very well on. Reading "Shiny Objects," you get the feeling that he is onto something.

Consider the matter of status competition. Mr. Roberts, like so many before him, argues that conspicuous consumption is an unhappy zero-sum game. But this is of course true of most forms of competition: Most academics I know can rank-order everyone in the room at a professional conference with the speed and precision of a courtier at Versailles. Any competition, from looks to money to academic credentialing, both consumes a lot of resources and makes many of the participants feel bad about themselves. Why, then, does the literature on status competition always tell us that we should redistribute capital gains or inheritances and never tell us that we should redistribute academic chairs or book contracts?

And so I was excited to see that Rutgers history professor James Livingston had written "Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul." The book sets out a provocative thesis: Since about 1920, net private investment has not correlated very well with GDP growth, as conventional wisdom has it. To hear many commentators talk, you would think that growth increases basically in tandem with savings and investment, but in fact the numbers bounce around a lot.

Consumption, not investment, is the key to prosperity, Mr. Livingstone argues; most of our recent woes, especially the housing bust and subsequent disaster, stem from excessive savings, driven by rising inequality. Rich savers with no particularly productive outlet for their capital create bubbles, he says, when society would be better off if ordinary people, and the government, had been given the money to spend rather than save. (Though "Against Thrift" is an argument against saving, it interestingly ends up in the same place as most arguments for it: with a call for greater government redistribution of incomes.)

But the question of whether saving is always productive is an important one. In the present crisis, the global economy has been damaged by serial stampedes of desperate investors seeking a safe-but-lucrative spot for their excess capital. Money fled housing bonds to money-market funds, money markets to sovereign debt, sovereign debt to gold. It now looks as if the euro may end up getting trampled to death by the herd. So savers do pose dangers.

Yet Mr. Livingston places far more weight on his favorite statistic about net private investment than it will bear, reaching the ludicrous conclusion that "economic growth since the 1920s did not require net private investment or net capital formation." Since 1947, the real value of businesses' tangible assets (everything from machine tools to the buildings they're housed in) has roughly doubled. Would we really be just as well off if it hadn't?

Mr. Livingston doesn't address this. He also attributes the "global savings glut" of the past decade to excessive wealth even though Asian central banks probably played a larger role than rich Americans and claims that the "Bush tax cuts" caused the housing bubble by leaving those over-saving rich with too much money to play with even though three-quarters of the lost tax revenues stayed in the hands of people making less than $250,000 a year—the de facto threshold for "rich" established by the Obama administration.

These are not small omissions; they are central rebuttals to his thesis that Mr. Livingston ignores. After sketching out his interesting but badly incomplete thesis, he simply moves his book onto a series of somewhat tedious meditations on consumer culture, heavily larded with confusing references to luminaries like Freud, Marx and Marcuse. These are confusing not because they are hard to parse but because there is no obvious reason for their inclusion.

Like their forebears in this robust polemical genre, neither Mr. Livingston nor Mr. Roberts gets us much closer to answering the essential questions: What makes American consumers spend as they do—and is it a bad thing? For some thoughts on these matters, I'd suggest turning to James B. Twitchell's "Living It Up" (2002), a wry account of the author's own complicated relationship with luxury brands that explores the moral and psychological aspects of our free-spending ways without seeming to be a paternalist rant against the folly of BMWs. "The pleasure of spending is the dirty little secret of affluence," says Mr. Twitchell, a professor of English literature and advertising at the University of Florida. "The rich used to do it; now the rest of us are having a go." He is keenly alive to the risks—and occasional risibility—of American-style consumerism. But he never pretends not to understand its undeniable appeal.

The money I spent on a Thermomix, after all, would have more prudently gone into an emergency fund, or retirement savings. Yet having spent it, I really do enjoy my little robocooker, and not because it is (embarrassingly) more expensive than all the other food processors on the block. It has significantly improved the number and tastiness of meals I make from scratch and thus my standard of living. Was it worth $1,500? Hard to say, but I wouldn't sell it back.

—Ms. McArdle is the economics editor of the Atlantic.